Such a composition can be written and designed when executives can harmonize around the 4 B's of Buyer Experience Innovation. Creating a new way of thinking that transforms the company that is in harmony with its buyers.
Buyer Insight
The fact that the buyer-seller relationship is undergoing transformative reshaping is backed by many quantitative oriented survey and studies. However, gaining true insight into buyer behaviors, attitudes, perceptions, patterns, and etc. can be gained via qualitative efforts that are grounded in ethnographic and anthropological principles. Buying today has become more sophisticated and has a multitude of variables that did not exist even a decade ago. It is fair to say that many organizations are adopting specific buying strategies whereby decisions are often made well ahead of any sales involvement and the decisions are more about who to purchase from versus what to purchase. Without investing in informing buyer insight, executives will be in the dark on how to craft buyer experiences that makes them part of an organization's buying strategies.
Buyer Personas
Buyer Personas, archetypal representations of real buyers, have enjoyed increasing attention over the past few years. Buyer personas, if constructed in the framework of profiles only, fall far short of their potential for executives to utilize as a resource for understanding who their target buyers truly are and for using buyer personas as an executive communications tool to harmonize the organization around buyer experience. Buyer personas have their roots in design principles and are of immense value when they are built on the foundation of qualitative research and put into action contextually through scenarios, narrative stories, and mapping. Executives can use buyer personas to bring the focus on buyers and the experiences that will endear them to the organizations.
Buyer Journey Mapping
Buying processes and buying decisions are being restructured many times over. This is contrary to prevailing conventional perspectives that buyers, in general, take a similar linear path to making buying decisions. There has been much realization that the traditional "funnel" as we know it has been radically changed yet what a new modified funnel may look like continues to be applied to the general as opposed to the one-to-one necessary. Buyer Journey Mapping, when conducted on the basis of qualitative research, can provide tremendous insight into not only the paths buyers take but also highlight the critical moments of truths that are relevant. Buyer Journey Mapping, when done for specific markets and/or solutions, provides a critical integrated view of the buying process and how building blocks can be formed to create a harmonized buyer experience.
Buyer Experience Design
Integrated design thinking will be critical to designing buyer experiences that resonates with buyers on an individual level but also creates alignment with organizations creating buying strategies. Informed with buyer insights, buyer personas, and buyer journey mappings, executives can lead their teams through initiatives of designing and innovating unique buyer experiences. We've seen new approaches and services arise out of the rapidly changing buyer landscape such as demand generation, marketing automation, content marketing, and sales enablement to name just a few. Buyer Experience Design can provides the guidance needed by executives to design the right composition of these new approaches that will help their organization deliver extraordinary buyer experiences.
